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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6756603" data-attributes="member: 22424">It's more complex than that.Every time D&D has moved to a new edition, its biggest competitor has been its own previous edition. The only possible exceptions to this are 4e and/or 5e, where the biggest competitor might be Pathfinder. (But that's by no means certain - an awful lot of people didn't move to either 4e or PF, and so it's not entirely impossible that 3.5e players is still the largest competitor. And, of course, Pathfinder is itself derived from a previous D&D edition.)So the game moving forward to a new edition can indeed be a good thing, allowing revitalisation and progress, but it does come at a cost: you inevitably leave a chunk of people behind. Do that too often, and especially too rapidly, and you have problems.I mostly agree with this. It's crazy to say that 1st Ed or 3e were failures simply because they didn't last forever - they did indeed sell huge numbers of books and both lasted a good number of years. 5e very definitely looks to be going the same way.4e, on the other hand, does seem to have been a failure by the criteria WotC set for themselves. Hence its relatively short lifespan and, especially, the radically different approach WotC have taken with the new edition. (And, yes, that leads to the somewhat absurd conclusion that what is probably the third-best-selling version of any RPG ever is considered a failure. I guess in the same way that "Star Trek: Into Darkness" can be considered disappointing for 'only' making $1b, because it compares less well with "The Avengers" and their $1.5b.)2nd Ed is a bit of a strange one, in that it lasted a long time but appears to have had the lowest core rulebook sales of all the editions. My suspicion there is that it had an awful lot of supplements and, especially, settings that people bought and used... with their 1st Edition books. (There was also the whole thing with TSR folding, but the reasons for that are many and complex. 2nd Ed itself doesn't seem to have been any part of those problems, though the many competing settings really didn't help. Even so, those were a drop in the bucket compared with other issues.)</blockquote>

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